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Featured in Development

Alex Bradbury gives an overview of the status and development of RISC-V as it relates to modern operating systems, highlighting major research strands, controversies, and opportunities to get involved.

Featured in Architecture & Design

Will Jones talks about how Habito, the leading digital mortgage broker, benefited from using Haskell, some of the wins and trade-offs that have brought it to where it is today and where it's going next. He also talks about why functional programming is beneficial for large projects, and how it helps especially with migrating the data store.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Katharine Jarmul discusses research related to fair-and-private ML algorithms and privacy-preserving models, showing that caring about privacy can help ensure a better model overall and support ethics.

Featured in Culture & Methods

This personal experience report shows that political in-house games and bad corporate culture are not only annoying and a waste of time, but also harm a lot of initiatives for improvement. Whenever we become aware of the blame game, we should address it! DevOps wants to deliver high quality. The willingness to make things better - products, processes, collaboration, and more - is vital.

Featured in DevOps

Service mesh architectures enable a control and observability loop. At the moment, service mesh implementations vary in regard to API and technology, and this shows no signs of slowing down. Building on top of volatile APIs can be hazardous. Here we suggest to use a simplified, workflow-friendly API to shield organization platform code from specific service-mesh implementation details.

GitLab 11.9 Released with Automated Secrets Detection

GitLab 11.9 has been released with automated secrets detection and additional merge request approval rulesets. GitLab is a software development lifecycle support tool, providing project planning, source code management, and CI/CD capabilities.

Secret detection is now included as part of GitLab’s Static Analysis Security Testing (SAST) functionality. Each commit is scanned during CI to check for inclusion of secrets, such as API keys. If found, the developer is automatically notified in their merge request. The results of the scans are also presented in the SAST reports in the security dashboard. This functionality is enabled on any application that has SAST enabled. It is also included in the Auto DevOps default configuration.

Also included in this release are improved merge request approval rulesets. Previously it was possible to specify either an individual or a group for required approval. With this release, it is possible to add multiple rules to a merge request, which allows a user to require specific individual approvals or any number of approvals from a particular group. Code owners, introduced in GitLab 11.3, are integrated into approval rules as well. As well, GitLab now supports requiring merge request approvals from code owners based on which files changed. Note that at the time of writing, this feature is disabled due to a regression.

With this release, the ChatOps functionality has been moved into the Open Source edition; previously it was only available as part of the Ultimate tier. This allows you to execute jobs and receive status updates directly in supported chat applications. Currently Slack and Mattermost are supported.

Building upon the remediation patch file feature released in 11.7, GitLab can now detect vulnerabilities and suggest possible remediations. Through the web interface you can create a merge request from the vulnerabilities details window, validate the fix addresses the problem, and merge into master. This functionality is currently able to scan for vulnerabilities from the yarn package manager.

Starting with GitLab 11.9, built-in templates for all security jobs, such as sast and dependency_scanning, will be included. These templates will be compatible with the GitLab version they ship with. By including these built-in templates into configurations, they will update automatically with upgrades to new versions of GitLab. Note that this method of defining security jobs now deprecates all other means of defining jobs. GitLab recommends updating to the new template keyword as support for other syntax may be removed as early as GitLab 12.0.

This release also includes a number of minor feature improvements including:

Container scanning results are now presented in the group security dashboard